How's the great dot-thing gold rush going?

Well, coffee.club just sold for $100,000

[bill]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/04/coffeeclub_sells_for_100000/ [theregister.co.uk]

How's the great dot-thing gold rush going? Well, coffee.club just sold for $100,000

Other launches for new names have been less successful: for every dot-club and dot-berlin (150,000 domains and counting) there has been a dot-rodeo (200 domains) or a dot-mortgage (120 and counting). On average, new internet registries have registered just under 10,000 domains each, meaning the market as a whole is currently running at a loss.

[tangor]

Pocket Change.

Of course, a pocket a whole lot larger than mine!

[ronin]

What's the address?

It's coffee-dot-club.

Okay, cool, I'll just type that into my tablet. Coffee-dot-club-dot-com. Errr... it's not coming up...

No, no - it's just dot club. Coffee-dot-club.

Yep. That's what I typed. Coffee-dot-club. Dot-com.

No, it's just dot-club. There is no dot-com.

Errr... What? What am I supposed to be typing here...? Tell me again - CoffeeClub-dot-com, right?

[RedBar]

You know everything's gone mental when we try to understand the stupidity of it all.!.!.!

[bill]

ICANN says its not trying to make money by introducing all of these new gTLDs ans it's a nonprofit entity, but given the nearly $200K per application + whatever other costs might be involved for maintenance, and the low uptake, it doesn't look like many people other than ICANN are making much money here.

[Webwork]

The latest "news" I read about Coffee.club was that it was a "$100,000.00 sale" . . to be paid at $10K a year . . which suggests there's a contract . . with terms and conditions . . which might include "we pay $10K if and only if . . and, OBTW, that $10K could include $XXXX, in value, of promotional work by the registrant for the .club registry . . ".

As a trained skeptic I'd like to see all contracts, memos, emails, transcripts of NSA recordings of phone conversations, etc before giving any credence to reported deals such as this. (It reminds me of another widely reported "deal": Flowers.mobi.)

I see such reports as attempts to grab some media attention, a/k/a "free advertising" and also as attempts to validate the new gTLD's "value pricing business model".

[edited by: Webwork at 4:17 pm (utc) on Nov 5, 2014]

[buckworks]

Something that occurs to me ...

People might recognize that www.example.tld is the address for a website but without the www. bit, a lot fewer people would recognize that about example.tld.

A domain using one of the new TLD's will be pretty much doomed to include the www. in all their promotions.

www.coffee.club

That would definitely undercut the coolness of a clever new domain.